Wednesday, June 27, 2007

I know that this will be among the most boring blog posts I have made, but it is from the heart, so please forgive.

I’ve been getting my EMMY freebees that come with Variety magazine. I really don’t watch much TV. I refuse to pay for satellite. Where I live it’s not even possible to get cable. I can’t get Fox or the CW or even CBS. If I would just turn my TV antenna south of the border I could get many channels, I tried this once and it was amazing the variety, but it was all in spanish and I haven’t gotten around to learning that language yet. But I digress...

So most of these shows are invisible. I think it is great to stick these shows into the daily industry mag. One is immediately disarmed by free stuff. If you didn’t like the previews you might still give it a chance because it’s something with at least some perceived value - a DVD. These DVD’s usually have more than one show on them, so an individual may keep the disc sitting around longer and watch other episodes. Most of the discs have art on them that depicts the actors or even the environment of the program, so you’re reminded if you see the disc laying around the house.

Next in line I find the Heros and House, free iTunes downloads. I thought, “that’s cool, I could download it on my notebook and watch it in the while I eat. Now, this would have been really great if you got more than one free show. But, hey, it’s free.

The most recent one I got was something from “thegreencampaign” I was going to throw it away, but it did say “EMMY” on it, so I thought, “hey, more free shows perhaps?”

It folds out to about 3 feet long, and this is what it says:

“CBS PARAMOUNT TELEVISION Putting Our GREEN Where It Counts”

“Once upon a time in a land called EMMY..."

“...There were BETA and VHS and then DVD’s. Each year in the season of for your consideration, cluttered packages collected, confusing the voting citizenry and threatening to destroy the kingdom. Until one day, the townsfolk in their infinite wisdom, made all things virtual and green.”

There is also a note at the end that states: “PRINTED ON 100% RECYCLED STOCK WITH SOY INKS”

So they have to start by explaining that this is an environmental issue, then they get into reminding us of clutter caused by VHS and BETA. Of course they must tag on the bulky DVD that takes up so much space and requires such destructive resources to produce. Then they get into the clutter on your desk, and the confusion it causes. That clutter and confusion is going to destroy the kingdom. The world? The world could be destroyed by EMMY clutter? No, from the context, we can see that it is the “LAND CALLED EMMY” that faces destruction. Wow, they are going to clear up the voting confusion! Then they bring us back to the environmental issue. It’s green, and even printed on recycled paper!

What forward thinking folks they are at CBS Paramount!

Now, I have some quibbles with this campaign. First off, you go there and there is no free download. You are locked to your computer looking at a low quality video in a browser window. Yes, the window can be enlarged to fit the screen and show how bad the detail really is, I think they are destroying their land called EMMY this year.

Another thing to dislike is the fact that they are really confusing the “voting citizenry” by trying to pretend this garbled message is an environmental campaign. My House & Heros download cards probably require less resources than this piece of paper, they certainly cause less clutter, and again, they show an image that relates to the show. You actually have to go to the CBS Paramount website to find out what shows they have. Even though I was totally turned off by this ad, I went to see the site. They do produce Everybody Hates Chris, which I have seen in the past and thought was pretty good. I already forgot what else was there, and all I have to remind me is a three foot long piece of recycled paper with a blank back. Really, they could have been a bit more environmentally friendly by making this thing half as long and writing on the other side.

Personally, I want more free shows and less fake environmentalism. It’s not like these guys aren’t making DVD’s of their shows anymore. I watched Everybody Hates Chris by renting it from Netflix.

Friday, June 22, 2007

Pre birth: Being in a womb as far back as I could remember was a bit confusing for me, especially since I could move around and even visit people. Of course, I couldn’t communicate with them because I was unable to use my lungs and hadn’t quite figured out how to kick out the proper signals. Fortunately I never heard a conversation that made me think, “oh, I really gotta get in on this”. Plus, everyone was muffled and I imagined that if I could speak, I too would be muffled.

During these long dull formative days, my thinking was along these lines, “I know that I have more potential, and I know there is more to life than this, one day I’ll climb out of this hell hole and see what’s on the other side”. One day I did just that, about a month before anyone expected. Immediate issues became readily apparent, too cold, too bright, doctors suck, I’m pretty sure thats not my family, am I even on the right planet? You know, the usual stuff. But there were some positives, a general sense of autonomy, leg stretchin’ time, actually that’s everything. The sense of autonomy was soon crushed, and leg stretching - as it turns out - wasn’t all I thought it could be.

Pre school: I really hated being a baby, being lower than a slug in mobility and as high as a god in comprehension were just two sides of my existence. Everything was pain, light was pain, sound was pain, and even thought had become pain. But thought was the only escape from the prison of my newness.

I had to change some of my plans after my move from fetus to child, partly because, even though I knew it wasn’t the case, I had sort of planned on being a fetus for the rest of my life. Not that I was unaware of my development, I was just a little new to planning. To be honest, I did have the impression that I had been a fetus for all eternity prior to my knowledge of this state, oddly, I cannot pinpoint when I developed this belief. Of course, for me, everything is a blur prior to when I was 1 year old.

My first scientific experiments were entirely based on my dreams. Such experiments as “do the things that are shaped like other things do the same things as those things?” and “do the same physical laws hold true in dreams and in reality?” were the topics of the time. The answers to both were “sometimes”. This may not seem like breakthrough research, but I had completed many such experiments by the time I was 2 years old. Unfortunately, I couldn’t (and didn’t have the desire to) write, and couldn’t get anyone to take dictation. I remember the important stuff though. Lizards aren’t wrenches, wrenches aren’t lizards, not all lizards are chameleons, wrenches can’t change colors, not all lizards can change colors, wrenches can come in different colors, we can’t afford fancy wrenches, all my tools are plastic, plastic tools are generally worthless, well, this list goes on and on, but you get the idea.

From about the time I reached two years of age I was plagued by dreams about my former lack of existence and my current distinct lack of omniscience. In my dreams I was somebody, in fact, I was sometimes everybody. We all kept our eyes on us. We could see us at all times. Dreams where almost everybody was me were very comforting, but when I would wake up again, I was just little ineffectual little me.

As for “potty” training, I will not describe all of the details of this experience, but I will say that as a newborn baby you are given many impractical evacuation procedures. Once you figure one of them out (even if it makes little sense such as the “crap in your pants and we’ll get that later” method) you move on to the next step and it becomes apparent that you’ve been wasting your valuable time and embarrassing yourself. Fortunately the devices and methods do get more reasonable. My mother claims that I was using a normal toilet at 1.5 years or earlier. I would have I’m sure, if I had been given the option, but I remember distinctly being 2.5 years old when I got my first “training toilet”. I also remember that it took me exactly one try to figure out how it worked. I must admit that I needed a brief explanation, but it was not a problem. It made real sense, the stuff you no longer want goes in the hole, I don’t need to carry it around anymore! Now, I was a bit disturbed to find out that the big porcelain thing next to the training toilet was yet another phase in this process. If someone would have just given me a boost at age 0, I could have foregone all the trauma associated with finding out that nobody in my family was interested in pushing the potty training envelope to new levels. I wouldn’t have to write this sad tell-all either.

Being a toddler is no better than being a baby, you get some mobility but that comes at a great price. One of the biggest problems is that your “cuteness” attracts people at first. Then when you try to avoid them they think you’re shy. It’s called “hate”, idiot! People hate it when a “toddler” has deemed them unfit companionship. They get really mad. Now, I wasn’t out to hurt anybody. But how long can you listen to obvious stupidity just because someone is older than you? I did it for years.

Schooling: After years of listening to idiots talk about being older I was finally 5 years old, I had been eagerly anticipating my first day in kindergarten. I foolishly thought school would be a place of learning. Imagine my shock when my “teacher” turned out to be one of the most ignorant turds I had met so far. I spent most of the year sitting in the closet as punishment for having standards, intelligence and morality. It didn’t help that kindergarten wasn’t a place of learning. My mom and sister stopped reading to me when I started kindergarten, so I had to teach myself to read. I hated reading, and before I taught myself I knew I would hate it, but I didn’t want to grow up to be an idiot like my teacher. Building blocks, nap time and drinking milk are not my idea of a well rounded education.

Just to make sure that you understand that I was trying my best to cooperate with this beast, I will share another embarrassing story. The teacher left us alone in the class and was gone for about 45 minutes. Leaving 20+ 5 year olds alone for that long is dumb, but she told all of us not to move from our seats. Well, other kids were running around, but if it wasn’t a blatant moral issue I was going to stick it out and wait. I peed my pants. When the teacher came back, she had the nerve to ask me why I didn’t go to the restroom. I just thought, "even blind obedience doesn’t work with this idiot". I was willing to put up with the shame of having been responsible for creating the class pee chair. And she just acted like listening to her was the problem. Of course, she was right, I knew she was an idiot. Why did I listen to her? Oh, well, all the kids were so stupid they lost track of the pee chair after a couple of weeks. Besides, I had learned a valuable lesson. Quit school as soon as possible.

On the job: After I quit high school I moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota and started working at industrial temporary services with the lowest of the low. In fact, we didn’t even get to enter in the front of the building. We had to go around the back and down 3 flights of basement stairs. People were too stoned to fill out the forms or too shaky to fill out the forms. Sometimes I’d come in and there would be no work for me, so I’d wait around until somebody started screaming twitching and vomiting because they didn’t get their fix in time. Then I would get the call. If only they had gotten their drugs the day before, I wouldn’t have been able to eat.

I worked at so many different companies, making balloons, potpourri, diet drinks, sorting mail, packaging beauty products, refurbishing cash registers and computers, and working on all manner of assembly lines. I worked in so many different buildings and industries that I have little recollection of what I have really done and who I met, but again I learned a valuable lesson. Everywhere I went, I was the standout. I stood out among all the temps of course. But I stood out among all of the other workers. It was a huge ego boost that allowed me to move on to bigger and better things. Since then, I’ve found that being in any environment with any group of people is an ego boost. At worst, I will be slightly better than the best person who has ever done my job. This is not to say that I could do absolutely anything better than anyone else. But I’ve either been better at convincing everybody else that I’m better at everything I have ever done or the natural perception that everyone invariably accepts is that I’m better at everything. Either way, you’ll be sure that I’m better than anyone else, and that’s all that really matters.

Inclosed you’ll find my resume detailing many technical and creative positions that I have held over the years. Some of which have included perks such as very expensive company cars, large offices and great respect.

I hope this is enough to convince you of the great blessings I could bring to your tapeworm farm. Looking forward to your response.X.

Thursday, June 7, 2007

Once upon a flippin’ day there was a little boy who loved to flip people off. He would smile, laugh and flip all day long. When he would do this everyone would smile and wave. He hated people, but loved his hate. The smiles and laughter just made everyone in the world love him all the more.

But he loved his hate so much that he couldn’t keep from smiling while he just kept flipping off the whole world.

Of course there were other reasons that his hatred did not become apparent to his adoring public. One good reason for this misunderstanding was that both of his hands were backwards. Typical flipping etiquette would dictate that the back of the flipping hand is shown, not the front. Another good reason was that he had two middle fingers on his flipping hand. These two middle fingers made the little boy feel that he was giving double the flip to the world every time he flipped. But to his adoring fans it looked all the more like a friendly wave.

One day in “I Hate Wood Shop Class” the little boy cut off all the fingers on his flipping hand except one, the middle-most of his two middle fingers. The little boy was ready to show the world what he really thought of them. His bloody flipping mitt held high for all to see, he ran outside crying and flipping like he had never flipped before. As he flipped to the cameras and flipped to the crowds, he saw a little girl with beautiful little porcelain hands flipping him off like there was no flipping tomorrow. He had found a soul mate. Then she shot and killed him. The crowd rushed to his flipping side (because there was no room on the left) and tried to revive him, but he was too far gone.

The girl rushed into the group and apologized. But the crowd just looked at her with sympathy and the mayor said, “That’s alright, you couldn’t have known that he was really waving to us, because it certainly looks like he’s flipping everybody off. But on closer examination you can see that he recently accidentally sawed off all his fingers except the middle-most one.”

The grave stone bore the engraving, “He waved because he loved” beneath that it simply stated “a misunderstanding”. This misunderstanding was not the misunderstanding they thought it was. The little girl knew exactly what she was doing. She was killing the only person she could ever love, because she was afraid of rejection.

There are two morals to this story: If you can’t learn to express yourself, try to become what you seem. And, if you can’t handle rejection, suck it up.

The kneecaps glistened with blind unabashed turbulence. As Sarah looked at her baby-grandmother smiling with arguable retrospect, she could never have suspected that this would be their final kneecap picking tour of southeast Asia. She wasn’t in the least prepared for what her (almost impossibly difficult to play) gaga uber-matriarch was about to relate. Because she didn’t know the future, she wasn’t omniscient. Are you even reading this?

Her high-strung baby-grandmother turned to her and said, “Child, I fear that this will be our final kneecap picking tour of southeastern Asia.” “No No! tiniest of tiny Nana’s! Say it isn’t so!” “It is so, or at least it is so likely that this story is entirely based on the premise. Did you just call me tinny?” “No, tiny” “Oh well, you wouldn’t have been totally wrong to describe me that way if you chose to, what, with this recyclable aluminum hip and a hearing aid that sounds like a gramophone recording of paper being crumpled.”

As the two pushed on through the kneecap fields they chatted away about everything from the alphabet to the other end of the alphabet. When they finished their chattering, they were so tired they decided to set up camp and catch some z’s.

As she drifted off to sleep Sarah’s conscious mind was flooded with the disturbances based on what her youthful progenitor had spoken, while her subconscious mind was obsessed with cataloging, maintaining, and sublimating a lifetime of repressed murders. Tonight these two worlds met as she drifted off to sleepy land.

Wielding her trusty chainsaw (or noggin plucker, as she liked to call it), she severed the head of the always lively - but now dead - genetically beneficent antecessor she had so revered.

The sweet irony of this tale is that Sarah was from this moment on, able to sleep calmly and peacefully every night, but all her waking hours were plagued by the knowledge of the atrocities she had committed over a life of nearly 28 years.

But here is where our story ends, that moment of awakening which scared and dislocated both conscious and subconscious, releasing them forever from their respective prisons and placing them squarely in each others.

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Being as I was constantly enveloped in unquantifiable splendor, the glow of my newly polished brass skullcap barely raised an inquisitive eyebrow. One day, I was just walking along and I fell to the floor and dinged my shiny new bean bucket. Well, I was so mad that I couldn’t do anything other than flap.

As I turned around, ready to use my swanlike neck to break the arms of my molester, who do I see but Chet Vargas, the biggest bully in school. Standing fourteen feet eight inches, I was dwarfed by his kneecaps. Chet just laughed. Little did he know the great strength in my whiplike neck. Snap! Snap! Snap! I chopped his legs out from under him (yes all three of them). Chad writhed on the floor panting and screaming in agony. Then I used my spork to gouge out one of his eyes and forced him to watch me with the other as I ate the one I had just removed. As I spit out the lense, I said, “you expect me to eat this lense? I don’t think so. I may eat everything from the point at which the optic nerve meets the back of the eye, all the way to the cornea, and I love the vitreous humor, not just because of the soft gelatinous consistency that makes for great snacking, but also because it is funny, but I am not eating lenses! Oh, humor, get it? It’s funny.”

Chet just groaned. I couldn’t be sure if he was groaning because of the physical pain or the mental anguish inflicted by my crass jocularity, so I sawed off one of his arms.

The rest of that day was a blur, but for such a bad start it surely must have ended up as one of my fondest memories.It’s just as they say, revenge is always sweetest amongst your school memories.

Terminology, nomenclature, taxonomy, classification and so on. We need to define what something is if we are to communicate to someone else what that thing is, or what it did, or how a certain anecdote involving that thing is actually an anecdote.

We can’t make sense to another individual without a shared language, so words need to have meaning. Simple names of objects, such as car, chair, shoe, desk, bed, etc, come up in daily life often, and if we didn’t know these words we’d be set back in our daily routine. If you come into the office in the morning and Jim (you know Jim) says, “what side of the bed did you wake up on?” or something to that effect, you would likely be very confused if you didn’t know what a bed was.

Anyone can say that they were using their binoculars to spy out a Parus major, or a Sula sula, and you would think they are intelligent and kindly Marlin Perkins type folks, when they are really greasy little perverts who happen to enjoy dead language double entendre. But you (and when I say “you” I don’t mean all of you, just most of you) didn’t know that.

So, you see, even many names, in fact most names, don’t make any sense to us. So we may have to make our own names. Names such as whippoorwill and chuckwillswidow are great examples of this homespun naming convention. If you forget the birds name just wait a minute or two and the bird will say the name again to remind you.

Besides the fact that many of those names are silly sounding, I don’t really have a problem with them. And when compared with Latin names that often serve no function except to tie in the name of one animal that you never heard of or can’t remember to another animal you never will see and won’t need to remember, the common names make more sense. However, they still fall far short, see the following example:

If you were visiting me at my home and I suddenly said, “I just saw a couple of great tits flitting about in the backyard” you would probably run to the window to try and see what’s out there. If I said, “I just saw a couple of parus majors flitting about in the backyard” you might casually walk to the window because you might still think I’m talking about ladies breasts, but if I said “I just saw a couple of little birds flitting about in the backyard” you would remain seated.

The irony of this scenario is that the lack of specificity gets the point across.

I think it’s great that people like to classify everything. Things need classifying. But if you see a cat running down the street and you say, “look at that equus caballus!”, I probably won’t correct you.

Saturday, June 2, 2007

Recently someone told me that I find philosophy boring and thus, must like shopping. Just to set things straight, I didn’t even say that I found philosophy boring, but rather, that he liked boring philosophy. I was intrigued by this statement though, because I have never before heard someone deal with shopping and philosophy as though they are two diverging points at a crossroads.

Must one really give up shopping to pursue philosophy or vice versa? Well, to start down the aisle to the rollbacks of enlightenment, let’s pull out our handy dandy dictionary.

The dictionary defines shopping as “of, for, or pertaining to examining and buying merchandise” or “to go from store to store in search of merchandise or bargains” and many other similar phrases. The dictionary definition that really encompasses all that shopping is would have to be, “To look for something”.

Now let’s do the same for philosophy. Definitions range from “rational investigation of the truths and principles of being, knowledge, or conduct”, and “the critical analysis of fundamental assumptions and beliefs”, to “the critical study of the basic principles and concepts of a particular branch of knowledge, esp. with a view to improving or reconstituting them”. To better compare the two points, let’s make them both verbs. We’re talking about shopping, and philosophizing.

Shopping remains the same, but philosophizing changes somewhat. The definition is “to think or reason as a philosopher” or “to speculate or theorize, usually in a superficial or imprecise manner”.

These definitions show that shopping and philosophy are not opposites, nor are they identical, however, they are very similar. Using the information we have already gained, we see that someone could philosophize while shopping, or even go shopping for philosophy. Certainly, if they were not creating their own (self-styled - totally morally, scientifically and spiritually autonomous) belief system, they would be shopping the entire time they pondered on philosophy. In fact, since philosophy is an “investigation”, “analysis”, or “study” of existing beliefs or assumptions, philosophy MUST include some degree of shopping. Unless, of course, the “philosopher” were not open to new ideas, in which case they would just be philosophizing in the sense that they would be speculating or theorizing, in a superficial manner.

So, any real philosopher must be a savvy shopper, constantly searching for bargain basement truths and saving up “get out of a pickle in the hereafter” coupons. When you find the right system of beliefs, why not chop the top, bore the cylinders, find some vintage mags with spinners, give it a flame job, pimp the whole deal, make it your own. Who cares if it is the metaphysical equivalent of a Mexican built VW Beetle, it’s got a Rolls Royce Grille! Happy shopping, pimping and philosophizing everybody!